They probably registered the name very early in their corporate life. At some point, they had a real business, and a business critical domain name, but they didn't realize they needed to do something different. My CEO registered our business names at network solutions, sigh.

Anyway, as a wakeup call -- if you have a business critical domain name, you need to find (and use) a registrar that has a registry lock procedure for the TLD you're in. A registry lock means the registry won't process changes from your registrar unless you authorize them, which makes it a lot harder to change things on purpose, or by an attacker. I imagine abuse takedowns could still go through though -- but there will at least be more people who know you care about your domain.

I can understand if they're a cement company with a website. Zoho is in the business of email with @zoho.com emails. This is a huge oversight which makes me question their whole company and how things might be internally.

This was not the company used. The domain registrar market has gone through consolidation and it ended up here. We have been moving domains and this is a cautionary tale for us.

I've been very happy with MarkMonitor. They have good customer service, a good reputation, and best of all, they auto-renew domains and send an invoice. That means that the failure mode is "domain is renewed, I owe them a check."

If your domains are riding on a credit card, you potentially have a failure mode of "card was declined, my domain did not renew, everything is down."

How much does markmonitor cost ? There is no pricing anywhere.

My invoices say $20/yr per .com; other TLDs are more expensive. Because we have a ton of domains we spend over $20k a year with them. I'm sure there is a minimum but I don't know what it is these days.

I would not say MarkMonitor is a tool for startups. It's a tool for organizations that would lose a lot if they lost a domain. I bet Zoho wishes they could go back in time and spend $10k to avoid this problem they had.

Back in 2014 they wanted a $10k/yr minimum.

I’m guessing that’s an indication that it’s prohibitively expensive for small organisations?

and then someone steals the domain out from under you and you'll need to pay in bitcoins to get it back.

You would be surprised how prevalent these problems are even with supposedly reputable registrars.

A commonly recommend option here in HN was NameCheap. Earlier this year without any notice they modified our DNS servers completely taking down our SaaS product.

Why? Some migration script run incorrectly.

They offered me a random TLD for free for one year as compensation! I declined.

Don't you think it's enough? You've told this story now five or six times in this single thread. Please stop.

I find that abusive.

Posting this once is ok, twice is questionable, 6 times in one thread is clearly abusive. Please stop now.

You seem to imply that reliable ≠ small, and that small registrars are cheaper.

In my experience, the opposite is true in both cases. Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.